"Anatomy of an Obsession"

by Charles Towers

I first heard of The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B in the fall of 1981, while reading a copy of the International Herald Tribune on a ferry between the islands of Rhodes and Kos in the Aegean Sea.

The Tribune carried an article about the recent West End opening of J.P. Donleavy's stage adaptation of his novel of the same name. Since I remembered reading the novel when it appeared in the late '60s, I made a mental note to see the production, which I did when I arrived in London several months later. From there, a casual evening of theatre turned into a personal obsession.

What I saw was a rough but wonderfully alive comedy that traced the unlikely friendship of two men of privilege during their glory days at Trinity College in Dublin through the tragedies that befell them in post-war London. On the surface, the topic was about as far as possible from anything that then interested me in the theatre. But Donleavy's marvelous language, in the hands of Patrick Ryecart and Simon Callow as the two friends, grabbed my heart and haunted me for the days and weeks following. Within the breadth of a phrase, Donleavy simultaneously renders the most obscene idea acceptable, shocking, funny and beautiful. His words embrace both the grace of Christian ethics and rampant sexuality, giving them equal due as potential elixirs of life. His language stands alone on the contemporary stage, blending elegant prose with a rough appreciation of all that is life-giving.

Balthazar B is a young man's play, with both the anger and yearning of youth. Its gut is camouflaged behind an elegant style, but therefore packs an even stronger emotional wallop. I was not the first to fall under its spell. In the late 1970s, when Patrick Ryecart had just made a smashing West End debut opposite Deborah Kerr in Shaw's Candida, he was was offered the part of Balthazar. When that and two other planned productions of the play fell through, Patrick, as a young actor with no producing experience but great energy, took on the battle himself. He broke through the legendary Donleavy defenses (Robert Redford once spent a week at the author's estate in Ireland trying to get the film rights to The Ginger Man, only to leave empty-handed after days of country walks) and convinced J.P. to let him serve as producer. Donleavy responded, as he would five years later with me, to Patrick's unbridled love for the piece. He chose passion over the lure of potential profit. His choice proved to be right. Where the commercial producers had failed, Ryecart succeeded. He hired a general manager, rented a theatre, found the backers, contracted for a director, convinced Simon Callow (who was riding high from his success as Mozart in the original Amadeus) to participate, and mounted a production that ran over a year on the West End. He took the seemingly lesser role of Balthazar (giving Callow the more flamboyant role of Beefy) and played it with a sensitive strength that broke the audiences hearts. Before the American premiere was even mine for the taking, I had already decided that Patrick would be a part of it.

My own history with the play began innocently enough with a letter to Donleavy inquiring about U.S. stage rights. I was back in America, without a theatre (freelancing, I suppose is the term) and with no prospect of one. I had some vague notion that I could represent the play to the resident theatres in the hopes of interesting some artistic director somewhere in a production. Donleavy's response was most gracious, but informed me that indeed (as feared) the U.S. rights were tied up by a commercial producer in New York. Blessed with naïveté, I shot a letter off to this producer (Harry Rigby of Kramer and Rigby) seeking some sort of affiliation with the New York production. The obsession had begun.

I carried on simultaneous correspondence with Donleavy and Rigby for almost six months, during which time I had decided to look for another artistic directorship. With uncanny timing, the Virginia Stage Company came along, and with mutual respect we joined each other. By late spring, 1983, I had a theatre again, at precisely the moment that Rigby was interested in preparing a regional production prior to Broadway, and a date was targeted during VSC's 1984-85 season. During the nearly two years that followed, the production went through an unbelievable series of ups and downs.

An exchange that would permit Patrick to play on Broadway had already been agreed to by both British and American Actors' Equity, but those weeks could not be used for a LORT production. I went to work immediately, with the civilized guidance of Willard Swire at AEA, to find a theatre in England where an American actor could be sent to balance Patrick's work in America. Because I was unsuccessful in securing an exchange in time, I released my interest in the production, and Rigby made plans to produce in on Broadway without us. I had lost the production.

By the spring of 1984, the New York plans fell through, and Rigby finally let go of an option that by this time he had held for over two years. I called Donleavy immediately (he was in London covering Wimbledon for The New York Times) and made an offer. We had met only once, but had corresponded regularly. Once again he recognized passion and granted my theatre exclusive production rights. Leon Rubin of the Palace Theatre in Watford, one of England's leading regional theatres, agreed to bring an American actor over in exchange for Patrick, removing that obstacle. A three-day work session in Ireland with Donleavy (mornings at his kitchen table, afternoons being run off the soccer field by the 60-year-old playwright) yielded significant changes in the script, which had never received proper attention during its hastily put-together London production.

We were back on track again - until AEA exchange details and financial considerations (the play calls for 13 actors playing 24 roles on 8 different sets) forced us to postpone the production yet another year. During that time, true to Donleavian principles, happiness was mixed by sadness. Work continued by mail on the script, but Harry Rigby, who still loved the play, passed away within two weeks of the tragic death of one of the production's only local supporters, VSC trustee David Frohman.

By the summer of 1985, almost four years since first seeing that Herald Tribune article, the production was finally in full swing. John Lee Beatty was hired to design the sets, with inspired results. Immigration difficulties were smoothed out the day before Patrick was due for rehearsals. I spent three months seeing actors for the most difficult role I have ever cast, that of Beefy, the divinity student with a ravenous appetite for sin. Out of virtually nowhere came Billie Brown, a writer and sometime actor, and a perfect choice for an almost uncastable role.

Donleavy was in Norfolk for almost the entire rehearsal period, working on the script while living up to his public image for the press, that of gentleman author returning to America for his first major U.S. production in almost 25 years. His quiet elegance is always a surprise to those who know his rough-and-tumble novels. He works with the same refined quality, spending hours over a single line. His support for the production was unwavering, and he yielded to theatrical decisions at every step of the way. (Although he says he writes his novels thinking of the theatre, he is a novelist first and foremost. His plays are all adaptations and he has never written directly for the stage. [Compendium note: Fairy Tales of New York was written as a play and then re-written a decade later as a novel, and an unproduced play, "The Venereal in the Vernacular" was never intended to be published as a novel.] Once he chooses to trust, he places it fully in his co-workers. He quite happily endorses the decisions of the theatre artists when hard choices had to be made.)

I write this in both the glow and the exhaustion that follow a successful opening. The play, with all of its challenging language, has generated within the Norfolk audience an unprecedented enthusiasm. My policy of not underestimating my audience is vindicated; they're absorbing the play fully, following each elaborate turn of phrase to its comic or tragic payoff. The seem to understand innately that The Beastly Beatitudes is not so much a play as an evening of theatre: 13 scenes of individual integrity which add up, over the course of almost three hours, to an event. I stopped long ago trying to explain my love for this piece. The time and energy spent cannot be justified by a three-week run, on sixth of a subscription series. But the ghost which has haunted me all this time is now off my back and on the stage where it belongs. Its exultation of the nobility of friendship, the longing of love, the triumph of courage over tragedy, now have voice in an American production.

Donleavy has returned to Ireland where he faces the world of his fertile imagination, leaving the ring of words that demand to be spoken, and small mysteries in his wake.

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